Browsing by Subject "Intergroup Contact"

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    Let's (fire)Work Together!": Exploring the Potential for Intergroup Contact between Nonbinary and Cisgender Individuals through a Cooperative Commercial Board Game"
    (2021-10) Yu-Chi Wang, Yu-Chi
    Nonbinary, transgender, and gender nonconforming students face disproportionately high rates of mistreatment related to their gender identity, including but not limited to invalidation, harassment, and violence from peers, teachers, and even school policies (James et al., 2016; Johns et al., 2019) These issues pose significant barriers to their educational success and are related to less favorable career and life outcomes. Given the success of intergroup contact for decreasing prejudice towards marginalized groups, cooperative interactions between nonbinary and cisgender individuals may reduce cisgender individuals’ anxieties about interacting with nonbinary people and reduce negative attitudes that likely lead to mistreatment of nonbinary and transgender people. Therefore, I conducted a study that focused on A) naïve cisgender participants’ attitudes towards nonbinary and trans people; and B) the nonbinary research confederates lived experiences and interpretations of these interactions. To facilitate positive contact context and prioritize nonbinary confederates’ comfort and safety during these interactions, participants played a cooperative board game together. Focus A was a quantitative randomized control trial, in which cisgender participants were randomly assigned to play a cooperative board game online with cis or nonbinary confederates. There were no significant differences in explicit attitudes reported by experimental versus control participants, and we discuss potential explanations for these results. Focus B was an interpretative phenomenological analysis of nonbinary confederates’ experiences and reflections on these interactions. Major themes that the nonbinary RAs reported were a focus on self-protection through expectation management, vigilance, and emotion management, misgendering as invalidation, representation and advocacy as empowering yet exhausting, importance of affirmation. These themes suggest helpful alterations to the interaction context and support further investigation not only into contexts that reduce distress but that also affirm and empower nonbinary individuals. The results of this study emphasize the importance of considering nonbinary individuals’ experiences—and marginalized voices and experiences at large—within intergroup contact. While this study was an initial exploration into this type of context, it will hopefully stimulate further investigation into effective yet empowering intergroup contact between nonbinary and cisgender individuals.